On the future of symbolic interactionism

Abstract

The papers in this section come from an idea that popped up in a bar after a day of meetings at the annual Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction (SSSI) meetings a couple years ago. The idea was to create an annual session at the SSSI meetings where we could bring together thoughtful people who knew the history of symbolic interactionism (SI) to hash out where they thought SI was coming from, the advantages of where it is, and where they would like it to go. The session would be called “Investigating Interactions” and would, in alternating years, focus on theory and methods. One of the prime reasons I wanted to institute this session was that younger generations of interactionists could learn a bit about our collective history. We interactionists do love good debates from time to time and I figured that an annual opportunity to discuss our paradigm would give us all a fairly neutral setting for generating productive discussions among people who otherwise might not be inclined to talk shop across the political and/or theoretical divides – a common condition in academic circles.

Citation

Angus Vail, D. (2008), "On the future of symbolic interactionism", Denzin, N.K., Salvo, J. and Washington, M. (Ed.) Studies in Symbolic Interaction (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 32), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 3-4. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0163-2396(08)32001-8